Adolescence can be terrifying. The monsters under the bed that frightened us in childhood are replaced by deeper fears, monsters all the more terrible because they just might be real. Kayla’s family has moved to a rural community, and things aren’t great at home. She feels cut off from the real world, and she’s always fighting with her new stepfather. Then one day she discovers a dying salmon on the bank of a stream. It’s diseased, rotting, its symptoms recalling those suffered by an old man who disappeared before her arrival.

But this find leads to another. A white-haired boy named Thor, who lives with his grotesque grandmother in a trailer, far off in the rank forest. As Kayla’s friendship with Thor deepens, she begins to understand the monstrous truth behind him and the backwoods community to which he belongs . . .

Marc Laidlaw began publishing in 1978, and spent the next couple of decades writing novels and short stories. In 1997, his supernatural horror novel, The 37th Mandala, won an International Horror Guild Award. Around this time, he joined Valve Software, where he has worked ever since. He helped design the landmark Half-Life series, famous mainly for its lead character who never speaks, and more recently served as lead writer on the multi-player phenomenon, Dota 2, with its hundred-plus characters who never shut up.

A resident of Washington State, he still writes short fiction, but mainly plays games clearly designed for the reflexes of much younger people.